And yet their traffic has completely recovered and maybe even increased, at least if you trust https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/# and similar social media tracking sites

Although tbf it’s probably accelerated the shift in Reddits demographic from users that post longform content to more casual users that just browse and upvote/downvote stuff without engaging beyond that. I doubt they care much bc they probably just want ad impressions and to become a titan akin to Facebook/twitter/etc. it seems short sighted but growth at the expense of community seems to be a common theme of vc backed anything